Prudentia

"Technofeudalism - What Killed Capitalism" by well-known Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis is the best book I've read in recent years! The central message: Corporations like Apple or Google sell licenses so that developers can program for their mobile operating systems. They don’t live off profits, but off license fees - essentially rent - and act like modern feudal lords who, for a fee, allow their vassals to cultivate the land. Such "cloud supercapitalists" exist in both the United States and the People's Republic of China; the remaining countries are vassals. This also explains the Biden administration's policy toward China, such as the ban on microchip exports. Even before this central message is presented, several chapters of this book deal with the history and metamorphosis of capitalism. We learn that under Roosevelt, the American economy was more like a planned, Soviet-style economy than true capitalism, which might also be the reason why the Aust...

For most of my life, I’ve watched people try to measure intelligence by building ever more elaborate puzzles. The assumption seems to be that if you make a problem sufficiently obscure, sufficiently time‑consuming, or sufficiently idiosyncratic, you will eventually force the “true” intelligence to reveal itself. But obscurity is not depth, and idiosyncrasy is not insight. What these tests usually reveal is not intelligence but endurance—how long someone is willing to sit in cognitive mud for the sake of a number. I’ve taken enough of these tests to see the pattern. The early items feel like real thinking: clean structure, genuine novelty, a sense that the problem is speaking a language the mind already knows. Then the test drifts. The structure dissolves. The items become private riddles written in the test designer’s dialect. Solving them requires not intelligence but a willingness to inhabit someone else’s logic for weeks or months. At that point, the test is no longer measuring me....

Having a high IQ is mostly a matter of not making your own life harder. The world, despite its theatrics, is built on the broken‑stick principle: take a 100‑centimeter stick, snap it at forty‑nine random points, and you’ll end up with a pile of short and medium pieces, plus a few long outliers. Problems behave the same way. Ninety percent are easy to moderately complex. Only a small minority qualify as “difficult,” and those are usually best left to the people who enjoy suffering. I follow the 90% Rule. In school, every chapter hides one “challenge problem” meant to impress the ambitious. Ignore it. An A earned by solving 90% of the work is indistinguishable from an A earned by solving 100%. The transcript doesn’t include footnotes about your heroism. Chess works the same way. Below 1200 ELO, you’re playing easy games. Between 1200 and 2200, moderately complex ones. Above that, you enter the monastery of the obsessives—people who treat endgames like scripture. I prefer staying in the ...

I've been reading about future technologies since my senior high school days. I graduated from high school in 2001. So it's a quarter of a century that has passed since then. My vision has been the following: A society in which nobody is forced to adapt to others. Everybody may have their own religious beliefs and may even speak their own language. Gene editing is legal, including germ-line therapy. This allows people afflicted with heritable diseases to have healthy children. It is also allowed to modify properties unrelated to disease, such as hair color, eye color and intelligence. The effect is that there are no ugly and no unintelligent young people any more. The Internet is widely used, and everybody expresses their views without inhibitions. Traditional media are replaced by electronic magazines where everybody can publish. Basically, these have been my ideas. What has materialized? The only thing that comes close to my vision is the Internet, but with restrictions. Sinc...

  The Babel Range: Why High‑Range Tests Drift Toward Private Languages I have spent an unreasonable portion of my adult life watching high‑range IQ tests mutate. What began as a niche hobby—an odd corner of the internet where people solved puzzles for sport—has evolved into something stranger: a linguistic archipelago of private dialects, each spoken by exactly one person, the test author. The more I look at these tests, the more they resemble a Tower of Babel built in reverse: not a single language fracturing into many, but many languages invented to avoid being understood. The designers call this innovation. I call it drift. The drift begins innocently enough. A test is released. People solve it. Someone posts a solution key. Someone else writes a solver. A third person feeds it to a search engine. A fourth person feeds it to an AI. The designer, horrified that their creation has been “compromised,” vows to build a purer test next time—one that cannot be solved by search, by...

These days, I read a lot in the media about neuroatypicality, ADHD, and autism. These topics have been discussed since around 2008. I remember this so clearly because back then I published an article in my magazine Hugi about schizoid personality disorder and received feedback that many members of the computer art demo scene didn’t have a personality disorder, but rather a form of autism that exhibits similar symptoms. It could also be that it just seems to me that these topics come up often in the media because I live in a bubble. But the incident I want to write about here took place in 2004, at a time when neuroatypicality wasn’t yet a common term. At the time, I was working as a medical student in the Department of Hematology and Oncology at Vienna General Hospital. During the summer break, I had gotten into the habit of going to bed late because I spent a lot of time reading Wikipedia, which was still fairly new back then. As a result, I was sleep-deprived when a chief’s rounds to...